Tuesday, July 18, 2017

In A Dragon Based Economy, Geography Doesn't Matter

In a Dragon Based Economy, apparently geography doesn't really matter. Or "everything you wanted to know about the Game of Thrones season premier, but we're too afraid to ask".

Dragonstone is near Jamie's feet, Kings Landing is 1/2 way to his sister & lover Cersei

I call it a "Dragon Based Economy" because that what John Oliver called it on Colbert's Late Night show twice last week. "We're talking some serious dragon money" - when Last Week Tonight bought 5 wax presidents from a closing Ohio Presidential museum. Game of Thrones is one of the Main anchors that brings in subscribers (and pirates) to HBO, along with Real Time (which I watch, every time it's on), The Leftovers (which I couldn't care less about), and Ballers (which I can't give even 1/2 a sh*t about no matter how hard I try). Westworld was a good series, and in my mind, Needed to STOP when it stopped. There's Zero Need to continue with Samurai Westworld, Outer Space Westworld, or Ancient Roman Westworld... but the bean counters and non-creatives at HBO apparently disagree with my perspective and want to keep raking in the cash from zombified viewers.

Another Danish actor steal jobs from good Americans & Brits

Now, why do I state that "geography doesn't matter"? Well, the newly usurping & murderous Lord of the Iron Born Euron Greyjoy (putting the "Ew!" in "Euron") shows up with an armada of "1000 ships" at Kings Landing, in an attempt to gain favor with Queen Cersei (and ask for her hand in marriage... ew!!! I think I just tasted some of my own vomit), but his massive fleet somehow doesn't run into the even more massive fleets of Greyjoy deserters, Unsullied warriors, 2nd Sons (I'm actually a 2nd son myself, heh heh), and the Dothraki Horde - not to mention 3 massive and very hungry dragons that have been flying air cover for the invading fleet - that Daenerys Targaryen is leading to the island of Dragonstone. Dragonstone, per the maps of Westeros, is near the eastern mouth of the long bay that eventually leads to Kings Landing. The Iron Islands, Pyke, are on the Western side of Westeros, north of Casterly Rock. THERE IS NO Northern Passage, as global warming has not yet melted the ice caps north of the Seven Kingdoms as it already has in Canada and Russia on this world in this age, where Polar Bear mothers now have to swim for more than a 100 miles with their newly born cubs to reach the pack ice, where upwards of 90% of the cubs are drowning, exhausted, as they used to only have to swim a mile or 2 at most. At least I got to see a Polar Bear in the zoo when I was a kid, before they all become extinct.

But human driven climate change aside, Ewwww-Euron's 1000 ships would have had to sail Down around the Southern end of Westeros, past Dorne, and then northward UP the Narrow Sea, side-by-side or just ahead / just behind Daenerys's even bigger fleet was sailing through, with 3 circling and hungry dragons who would have obliterated the 1000 Greyjoy ships just as they torched the slavers ships in Slaver's Bay several seasons ago, until the slavers finally surrendered and Daenerys took their ships for her crossing of the Narrow Sea. I've included a handy screen shot from the episode where Cersei is standing in the middle of a courtyard painted as the map of Westeros, for your reference, above. Both fleets could no co-exist in the same Narrow Sea at the same timer even within a few days of each other, due to their MASSIVE sizes and the remarkably slow pace that sail driven sea travel has when flying just one or 2 sails, and not a massive array of studding sails, spanker sails, royal, sky, moonraker, and top sails as Only Euron's flag ship tried to set (with aerodynamic inaccuracies, sorry special effects folks who were concerned more with style than substance). "That which is dead can never die" ... no.. how about "that which is dumb cannot get dumber", or "that which is repulsive cannot get even more repulsive". So Euron's travel to and appear in Kings Landing was not logistically possible, unless he somehow teleported or owned a T.A.R.D.I.S. with enough capacity to move his entire fleet instantaneously without running into Daenerys's fleet.

Sure, "The Twins" where they Freys slaughtered and then got slaughtered themselves ("poison is a woman's weapon") apparently divides the northern part of the Seven Kingdoms from the southern part, perhaps for lack of any small boats that could traverse the water way southeast of "The Twins", I can understand that. But the waterway that "The Twins" crosses Does Not extend all the way to the west coast of Westeros, so there's no way Euron and his massive fleet could have sailed down it.

Geography aside, the Season 7 premier was pretty good. Several other poignant observations I made in retrospect are as follows:

1) what's scarier than a whole horde of decomposing white walkers who can't be killed with steel weapons? A horde of decomposing white walkers who have in their ranks ancient Giants whom they've killed and then resurrected as blue eyed white walkers before the giant corpses could be burnt. Undead zombie giants are Far More Lethal than undead foot soldiers or undead calvary. An undead giant could lob a spear the size of a telephone pole with a big nasty pointy end, far into the air (like the height of "The Wall" as happened several seasons ago when the Wildling Free Folk attacked "The Wall" with Giants at their side)... and such a spear could impale one of the precious 3 dragons, perhaps killing it. Then... the Night King resurrects the dead dragon as a undead dragon... and it kills the other two remaining dragons. That would be Game Over, for Game of Thrones.

What's worse than one white walker Giant? Three white walker Giants!

2) if you were not watching with closed captioning on (as we do in our house, with hearing impaired viewers and for clarity), you would not know that the massively gray scaled hand that tried to reach out to Samwell Tarly was indeed the hand of Jorah Mormont (former Lord of Bear Island, then reluctant slave trader to keep his wife comfortable and provide "the lifestyle to which she was accustomed", then kidnapper of Tyrion and rebuked suitor of Daenerys). Seems that Jorah made his way to Old Town to seek a cure for grayscale from the Maesters, but Westerosian medicine still didn't have a cure for that ailment.

3) if you've stolen the keys to the forbidden & locked up Maester reference library, and you have only a few seconds to lift an ancient book from the bizarrely chained shelves (was Old Town seismically active?), make sure you pick The Exact Tome that has the history of the Last Winter in it, that shows Precisely where a whole mountain of Dragon Glass is on the island of Dragonstone (at the mouth of the bay that leads right to Kings Landing)... it just seems rather far fetched to me, as I am old enough to remember going to the library Before there was a searchable internet, and you had to use the card catalogue, or the headache inducing microfiche, and you spent hours and hours searching to find just one or two gems that you could include in a bibliography. There was no Google, Yahoo, Bing, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, Infoseek, or Webcrawler back when I was in school. If you wanted to find a book in a library, you had to search for it, long and hard, and hope you got lucky and it wasn't checked out when you finally located it. Samwell Tarly grabs it The First Pick, while under pressure of being discovered a few seconds later by the next Maester who walks in. Sure... let's keep suspending disbelief.

Voted most likely to be killed by White Walkers by his Free Folk High School

This should be a good season. Let the white walkers come... depose the angry Cersei who has no allies (let Arya do it, gleefully)... make a bunch of weapons out of Dragonstone's Dragon Glass cache... wipe out the Greyjoys from the surface of the sea and have their octopus god devour their rotting remains... let the alternative lifestyle Dorne and Greyjoy girls enjoy themselves together... sacrifice the Free Folk & their leader Tormund Giantsbane to the white walker hordes just as corporate America does to the middle class without blinking an eye... have Brienne take out The Mountain as she took out his little brother and then she and Jaime can get together... let Samwell Tarly save the day with his book-learnin... and let Jon Snow get it on with his 1/2 sister Daenerys once the Starks and Daenerys armies band together to fight the White Walker horde. I can't care about Baelish, Bran, Sansa, Qyburn, Podrick, man-bun Thoros or one eyed Beric very much at all. Sure, Martin can kill off most of the main characters and elevate any of these lesser roles if he wants to... but... that would hurt the franchise at this point, and HBO wants to keep making money. Please just let it be one or two more seasons... and not 4 or 5 more, or it'll go on far too long as the books have.

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Create your own visitor map!Gray Background tones, because despite many peoples' view that Everything in the world is simply Black or White, (all fundamentalists, many engineers, few scientists, lots of confused persons, many digital thinkers) there's all sorts of shades of gray, everywhere you look. Good wine doesn't have to be expensive. Conservatives do not have to be selfish and insane wing-nuts. Liberals do not have to have socialist-abortion-producing-crystal-worshiping-gay-marriages. Racists, xenophobes, fundamentalists, and willful ignorance suck. The Earth is Much Older than 6000 years. Don't be afraid of Science, embrace it. The web's a great tool. ..in the humble perspective of this INTJ alpha male.